Saturday, November 12, 2011

52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History - Politics

52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History by Amy Coffin is a series of weekly blogging prompts (one for each week of 2011) that invite genealogists and others to record memories and insights about their own lives for future descendants. You do not have to be a blogger to participate. If you do not have a genealogy blog, write down your memories on your computer, or simply record them on paper and keep them with your files.

Week 46. Politics. What are your childhood memories of politics? Were your parents active in politics? What political events and elections do you remember from your youth?

This challenge runs from Saturday, November 12, 2011 through Friday, November 18, 2011.

Politics, eh? They say to never discuss religion or politics if you want to keep a conversation friendly. If this blog post is really short, you'll know I wrote a whole bunch and then decided against posting it for one reason or another. I'm actually concerned that posting this could come back and bite me at some future time, depending on where our country and world go from here.

To the best of my knowledge, neither of my parents were politically active beyond voting every four years, and I'm not entirely positive they always did even that much. People in my neighborhood didn't seem to talk about politics that much, at least not with us kids around.

I am young enough that I wasn't around when Kennedy was shot. I don't really remember Lyndon B. Johnson. I do, however, remember Richard M. Nixon saying he was not a crook, not a quitter, and then resigning before he could be impeached. I remember liking Gerald Ford despite the lampooned trips that would get laughs for many years afterward. I thought he should have been elected in place of Jimmy Carter. Not that I didn't like Jimmy Carter, I just didn't think he was the right man for President. Looking back, I still think we'd have been better off with Gerald Ford.

I was still too young to vote in 1980, but I was pulling for Ronald Reagan to win. Apparently I was quite a little conservative in my youth. In 1984, I came of age and voted for his re-election. Then I joined the Navy as he was building up to a 600-ship force. George Bush the Elder continued that plan in 1988, and as I was on active duty, that meant more possibility for me to get advanced, and pretty much guaranteed pay raises even if not advanced.

I was still on active duty in 1992 when Bill Clinton got elected. Again, I thought he was the wrong man for the job, though in hindsight, the country did pretty well on the whole under his leadership. I never did favor him while he was in office, and I still think he and Hillary got off easy with their scandals. However, by the end of their terms, I was beginning to like where the country was at, and headed, and it looked like Al Gore might move further in that direction. I especially liked the push toward renewable energy and lessening our dependence on foreign oil. That has always struck me as a poor thing from a national security standpoint, and it still does.

Unfortunately, Al Gore didn't fight for the presidency as hard as George Bush the Younger. However you may feel about that election, I still believe the Republicans stole it from the people. And that's the turning point when I realized the Republican Party no longer represented my interests. Neither, though, did the Democratic Party, and to this day I have no allegiance to either. In fact, I never officially joined any political party. It has become apparent to me that all of them have greed and corruption of one sort or another, none of them represent anything but power grabs for their top players, and even more so for people behind the scenes like Karl Rove during George W. Bush's terms, and the Koch brothers in the current political situation

I tend to agree with whoever said that anybody who actually wants the job of President should be automatically disqualified from holding that job.

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